GPS is not fleet management
Nearly every fleet in the country already has tracking. Nearly every fleet still cannot tell you, without asking someone, which vehicles are free on Thursday, which are due for fitness renewal next month, or which driver has an expiring licence.
2 min readOadbox
The map answers where, not whether
A tracking screen is a live map. It is excellent for a customer call about a delayed shipment and useless for planning, costing, compliance or maintenance — none of which are location questions.
The confusion is understandable because tracking is the visible part. It is also the part that has been commoditised, which is why it is what gets sold.
The questions a fleet actually runs on
- What is available for allocation tomorrow, by vehicle type and location?
- Which vehicles have documents expiring in the next sixty days?
- Which driver is due for licence renewal, and who is rostered where?
- What did the last service cost, and what is due at the current odometer?
- Which customer has unbilled trips, and which has unpaid invoices?
- Which route lost money last quarter?
None of these come from a tracking feed. All of them come from a vehicle master, a trip record and a maintenance history that most fleets keep in three unconnected places.
Maintenance is preventable spend or unplanned downtime
Scheduled by odometer and by date, with parts, labour and downtime recorded per job, maintenance becomes a cost line you can manage. Left to breakdown, it becomes a series of emergencies costing several times as much, each of which also cancels a revenue trip.
The record that makes this work is unremarkable: a job card per intervention, tied to the vehicle, with the odometer at the time.
Compliance is a calendar problem
Fitness certificates, permits, insurance, PUC, road tax and driver licences all expire on their own schedules. A single lapse can immobilise a vehicle at a checkpoint hundreds of kilometres from home.
This is a solved problem the moment the dates are in one place with an owner and a reminder. It stays unsolved in most fleets because the dates live in a folder in the office.
Written by the Oadbox team. Something here not match how it works in your business? We would genuinely like to hear it — connect@oadbox.com.